The Incredulity of Thomas (2024)
Bass Voice Solo with Six Strings (2 vn, 2 vla, vc, cb)
Duration: 8 minutes
Program Note
'The Incredulity of Thomas' takes as its subject the story recounted in the Gospel
of John in which Christ is said to have appeared to his disciple Thomas, who had
previously expressed doubt about Christ's being resurrected from the dead. The
subject of Christian art since at least the sixth century, until the Protestant
Reformation it was often depicted in highly physical terms, notably Caravaggio's
striking oil painting of the same name.
The work began as a liturgical work I composed in 2021 for use as a Communion hymn
for the Second Sunday of Easter. Over the ensuing years, as I contemplated the
frankly bizarre story, I began to feel that it warranted the sort of broken, diseased
tonality that I had been exploring in recent works and set about building on the
strophic hymn to create something less tied to liturgical use. Eventually I was led
to the more visceral versions of the story as presented in the medieval English
Mystery Plays, with their emphasis on the grotesque - 'putte in thi hool hande'
is a far cry from the sentiment of 'beholding the wounds' - their narrative arc and,
in the so-called N-Town play, a moral rejoinder from Thomas himself, capped off with
a wonderfully medieval turn to the Latin, as if to emphasize moreso the truth of the event.
The text combines several versions of the appearance of Christ to Thomas as presented in
the English Mystery Play tradition - the York and Chester cycles and the N-Town travelling
plays (the 'N' is a stand-in for the name of town in which it would be presented) - as well
as in early English Bibles, notably William Tyndale's translation of the New Testament
rendering, John 20:29, in the so-called 'Matthew's Bible' of 1537. Additionally bits of
Psalm 118 (117):1 from that edition and verse 24 from the revision, the Geneva Bible
of 1560, make an appearance.
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Score
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